Unified commerce brings tomorrow’s customer experiences

Get it together: consumers expect consistent, smooth interactions across all brand touchpoints

11 January 2019 • 12:00pm

This holistic approach unifies all data into a single platform, reduces complexity, errors and delays, and keeps retailers prepared for the continuous evolution of consumer expectations and demands

More than four-fifths (81pc) of retailers plan to deploy unified commerce software within three years, BRP Consulting reports.

Digital disruption has accelerated change in retail. Today, consumers can get any piece of information or product they want with a swipe on their phone. Instant gratification is the new normal.

As speed and convenience become ordinary, retailers are left to compete on other fronts. Walker Insights predicts that by next year the battlefield for brands will be customer experience. At the same time, consumers’ expectations on what constitutes a great experience are also evolving.

How shopping has changed

In yesterday’s retail world, friendly in-store service, a functional e-commerce website and a decent mobile app – all handled as separate functional entities – were enough to stay on top.

Unified commerce software centralises all data on prices, inventory, offers, orders, customers and product content into one management system

While many retailers still manage their business as a set of disconnected channels, consumers expect consistent, smooth interactions across all brand touchpoints. They want to browse, buy, pick up, return and exchange products where, when, and as they prefer.

They also expect to see all the information they need to make a choice, when they need it – product details, item comparisons, and real-time stock availability, online and offline.

Today’s customers also require personal attention. They demand that store associates be engaging and as knowledgeable as they are about products.

For modern shoppers, loyalty goes two ways: they expect to be recognised by the brands they patronise, and want personalised attention and suggestions, whatever the channel they use to interact.

The new paradigm

Retailers using yesterday’s tools and technologies will not be able to deliver today’s great customer experiences.

Take visibility of products. To offer this, retailers need to have a single view of their inventory, and the means to share this knowledge with store associates on one side, and consumers on the other side.

Consumer tastes shift rapidly. To keep up, retailers must be able to see product demand in real time across their chain.

To deliver personalised attention, retailers must be able to recognise customers across channels, and combine these interactions into a single view of their consumers.

For businesses running traditional standalone retail software systems, all these tasks sound impossible. And they are. In a traditional retail set-up, information on products, customers or sales is stored in separate databases, and cannot be easily connected in a meaningful, reliable way.

As a result, retailers are left juggling fragmented data that could be used to deliver great customer-centric experiences – if it were not too costly and complex to organise, analyse and correlate

The future of retail: unified commerce

To effectively use the data, and deliver the experiences consumers demand, retailers need new technology. They need unified commerce.

A unified commerce strategy isn’t another thing you need to worry about – it’s the only thing you need to worry aboutJustin Guinn, content analyst, Software Advice

Unified commerce software centralises all data on prices, inventory, offers, orders, customers and product content into one management system. This enables retailers to easily oversee and manage all their information in a uniform, consistent way across all their sales channels.

By maintaining all information in one database, unified commerce software also gives retailers a straightforward, real-time picture of their customers’ habits, preferences and behaviours.

This highly organised data can then be run through predictive analytics and artificial intelligence tools to deliver valuable business insights that retailers can leverage to take better business decisions – for example, aligning pricing and replenishment to actual demand – and build more effective, engaging and personalised customer interactions.

Unified commerce enables retailers to put customers at the heart of their business – but that is not all there is to it. Unified commerce is, at its core, a holistic approach that encompasses the whole enterprise, and transforms it for the future.

By unifying all data into a single platform, it reduces complexity, errors and delays, and keeps retailers prepared for the continuous evolution of consumer expectations and demands.

As Justin Guinn, content analyst at Software Advice, says: “A unified commerce strategy isn’t another thing you need to worry about – it’s the only thing you need to worry about.”